BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE  ***

Reviewed 10/13/02

Michael Moore, most famous for his documentary, ROGER & ME, on General Motors disenfranchising Flint, Michigan, returns with his most ambitious project since then, BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, a look at guns and violence in America.

Moore has made a career out of casting himself as the little man (despite that his belly probably outweighs Mike Tyson) fighting against vast societal institutions of moral and economic injustice.  He never makes any attempt to hide his leftist bias and just barely any of his smug superiority.  He is nevertheless usually quite funny and makes some cogent arguments.  If only he could transcend his 30% self-aggrandizement to 70% substance ratio, the political left would be less apt to treat him like a clown.  Moore showed more self-restraint in ROGER & ME, but has since resorted to more cheap shots at his opponents and unnecessary reaction shots of himself telling the viewer how to feel.

Michael Moore loves stupid people, and luckily for him there are plenty of them out there who witlessly play into his condescending sarcasm.  Virtually all of his nonfiction work plays like black comedy as Moore utilizes horrifying absurdities for laughs.  BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE starts off with Moore at a bank which offers a free rifle for opening a CD account with them.  At a Utah town which passed a law requiring all residents to own guns, Moore questions whether it applies to blind people.  In an interview with Michigan militia members once associated with Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, one of them decries that anyone who is unarmed is an irresponsible American.  Moore does not have enough self-control to keep from going off on unrelated tangents to mine humor.  He just has to point out the militia’s amateurish girlie calendar incomprehensibly used for fundraising.

The facetious title of course stems from the 1999 Columbine school massacre in Littleton, Colorado, in which two students, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, killed twelve of their peers and one teacher before killing themselves.  Moore presents powerful actual footage of the event courtesy of surveillance cameras on the premises before turning his attention as to why there is so much gun violence in America.  The United States, after all, has about ten times the number of gun-related deaths per capita compared to any other first world country.  Moore shows footage of “the experts” blaming Columbine on the influence of music, movies, video games, and parents.  Yet other countries are exposed to the same music, movies, and video games without its children turning homicidal.  Moore points out that even the availability of guns is not in itself the culprit as Canada has 30 million people and 7 million guns and only had 165 gun deaths the previous year compared to 11,127 for the U.S.  One Canadian notes that if more guns made people safe, the U.S. would be one of the safest places in the world, but the opposite is the case.  Others say violence comes naturally to Americans due to its vicious past, but even with nearly wiping out Native Americans and the slavery of Africans, the U.S. is not alone in sharing a history of brutality.  The Germans and the Japanese have historically been even more cruel.  Since Klebold and Harris were avid bowlers, why not blame bowling, Moore wonders glibly.

Where BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE finds new ground in the gun debate is in interviews with Matt Stone, the creator of “South Park” originally from Littleton, and rock star Marilyn Manson, who received much blame for warping young minds after Columbine.  Both articulately note that the U.S. operates through a culture of fear.  Manson says people are afraid of him because they fear nonconformity and that much money is made from selling fear, whether it be fear of burglars, pimples, or bad breath.  Barry Glassner, who wrote the book “Culture of Fear,” agrees that the media preys upon unfounded fears from the Y2K catastrophe that never was to African killer bees that never arrived to the unfair stigmatizing of black men.  Even as the murder rate plummets, fear of crime continues to rise and whites flee to suburbs.   The “If it bleeds, it leads” mentality in the news lies in the pursuit for sensationalism which lead to higher ratings, politicians use fear to get support for their policies, and corporations elevate insecurities to sell merchandise.  All of it results in an irrational increase in paranoia that generates a hair-trigger response.  Moore’s conclusion is that if a society is more prone to violence, fewer guns, not more is the way to go.

Despite its intriguing ideas, BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE unfortunately ends with its weakest segment as Moore goes to interview a dithering, old Charlton Heston, who plainly has no clear ideas on anything related to gun violence.  Instead of making Heston’s insouciance the point, Moore rankles with his shameless self-promotion as he tawdrily raises a photo of a slain 6-year old.  Heston lumbers off as does any good will Moore had generated for his position.